Managing and provisioning VMs
Touch and Go
© Lead Image © adchariya chanpipat, 123RF.com
With Vagrant, you can automate the creation and management of consistent virtual machines that work across platforms.
Automation is the key ingredient for efficiency in any system administration strategy. If your job involves spinning virtual machines (VMs) regularly, you should familiarize yourself with Vagrant [1], which helps you make consistent virtual environments available to your users with a few keystrokes. Vagrant provides a simple and easy to use command-line interface (CLI) that helps automate the creation, editing, running, and deletion of VMs. Moreover, it supports all major virtual platforms, such as VirtualBox and VMware, and plays nicely with all the well-known software configuration tools, such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Fabric, and more.
Since VM hypervisors like VirtualBox and VMware have their own CLIs that can be used to automate provisioning, why should you choose Vagrant? Vagrant offers consistency and interoperability. With Vagrant you can define your virtual environment in code and then use it to provision VMs on top of any hypervisor running on any operating system. Additionally, anytime you make changes to the virtual environment, instead of sharing the complete VM that can be worth several gigabytes, you can share a simple text file that can then be used to provision VMs with the changes.
A Rolling Start
While Vagrant can provision VMs with various virtualization software, by default it uses the free and open source VirtualBox.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Ubuntu 25.04 Coming Soon
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) has been given an April release date with many notable updates.
-
Gnome Developers Consider Dropping RPM Support
In a move that might shock a lot of users, the Gnome development team has proposed the idea of going straight up Flatpak.
-
openSUSE Tumbleweed Ditches AppArmor for SELinux
If you're an openSUSE Tumbleweed user, you can expect a major change to the distribution.
-
Plasma 6.3 Now Available
Plasma desktop v6.3 has a couple of pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve.
-
LibreOffice 25.2 Has Arrived
If you've been hoping for a release that offers more UI customizations, you're in for a treat.
-
TuxCare Has a Big AlmaLinux 9 Announcement in Store
TuxCare announced it has successfully completed a Security Technical Implementation Guide for AlmaLinux OS 9.
-
First Release Candidate for Linux Kernel 6.14 Now Available
Linus Torvalds has officially released the first release candidate for kernel 6.14 and it includes over 500,000 lines of modified code, making for a small release.
-
System76 Refreshes Meerkat Mini PC
If you're looking for a small form factor PC powered by Linux, System76 has exactly what you need in the Meerkat mini PC.
-
Gnome 48 Alpha Ready for Testing
The latest Gnome desktop alpha is now available with plenty of new features and improvements.
-
Wine 10 Includes Plenty to Excite Users
With its latest release, Wine has the usual crop of bug fixes and improvements, along with some exciting new features.